''On Chesil Beach'', Ian McEwan

My name is Jenny, and I have an Ian McEwan problem. Here's the issue: I don't like Ian McEwan books very much. But I still buy each new one that comes out. Why? I think it's because somehow I feel I should like him; that a liberal middle-class Guardian reader such as myself should like this most famous of modern authors. And yet, the shameful truth is that ''Atonement'' bored me; ''Enduring Love'' left me cold; ''Saturday'' I could take or leave. Admittedly, I did quite enjoy ''Amsterdam'', and perhaps it was the residual memory of that novel that has made me ''give McEwan a go'' so many times, but I have to say that many other authors who disappointed have not had the benefit of the doubt so many times.

So, strange book lemming that I am, I recently read ''On Chesil Beach'', McEwan's latest (and current favourite on the ManBooker 2007 shortlist). Rather wonderfully, it also turned out to be pretty fantastic. It's a very short novel (a novella? what's the difference, technically?) about a couple on their wedding night in the early 1960s, and crushingly evocative of a time which to people of my generation is rather absent - neither ''history'' nor remotely near to living memory. And yet for all that I couldn't relate to the society in which these people lived, McEwan did a fabulous job of conveying the timelessness of romantic tragedy. Living in a time and place of sexual saturation in the media, it's refreshing to be reminded of the mundane reality of these things on a human, falliable, scale. Without giving too much away, I also loved the ending, for the same reason I liked ''Lost in Translation''. Perhaps I am a little too tragic.

''On Chesil Beach'' has therefore done little to help my McEwan problem. I will now be helplessly drawn to his next in the hope it's this good; what are the chances?